This double bill brings together two Godardian remake projects, one completed (Numéro deux/Number Two, 1975), the other not (a shot-by-shot remake of Jacques Becker’s classic 1954 gangster film, Touchez pas au grisbi/Don’t Touch the Loot). These projects illustrate the principle of ‘remaking’ that was central to Godard’s practice. As he put it in relation to À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960): ‘What I wanted was to take a conventional story and remake, but differently, everything the cinema had done.’*  It is a concept he revisited at length almost six decades later in Le Livre d’image (The Image Book, 2018), the opening section of which is titled simply ‘Remakes’.

In the mid-1970s, Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville embarked on a remake of À bout de souffle, to be produced by Georges de Beauregard, who had also been responsible for the earlier film. Initially titled À bout de souffle, numéro 2 (Breathless, Number 2), then Numéro deux (À bout de souffle), the aim of the project was not only to reflect on À bout de souffle, but also on the concept of remaking generally, and on how production processes had changed between 1960 and 1975. Nonetheless, Godard and Miéville spent a good deal of time reflecting on which sequences from À bout de souffle they might remake, on whether children, middle aged actors or elderly people would play the roles, and on the extent to which they would need to modify the original dialogue. They also considered incorporating telecined footage from À bout de souffle into the new film.

By the time Numéro deux was released they had jettisoned any reference to À bout de souffle in the title altogether. The final film’s formally astonishing investigation of working-class family life contains no obvious traces of its origins in the earlier one and demonstrates how far in Godard’s practice a remake could end up from the source that had inspired it.

Godard toyed numerous times in his subsequent work with the idea of remaking films he admired by other directors. Thus Passion (1982) started out as a remake of Jean Renoir’s Toni (1935), to be titled Derrière la gare (‘Behind the station’), which he envisaged transposing from southern France to the Spanish quarter in Geneva. For the most part, however, his remake projects remained unrealised. These included Robert Bresson’s Les Anges du péché (Angels of Sin, 1943) and Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne, 1945); Marcel Pagnol’s Angèle (1934); Renoir’s La Chienne (The Bitch, 1931); and a venture he said he had taken quite a long way at one point in the 1990s, Becker’s Touchez pas au grisbi, which was of course one of the many films he had ‘remade differently’ in À bout de souffle.

This screening will be introduced by Michael Witt.

Programme
Don’t Touch the Loot (Touchez pas au grisbi), dir. Jacques Becker, France/Italy 1954, 96 min
Number Two (Numéro deux), dir. Jean-Luc Godard, France 1975, 88 min